What is stevia and is it healthy? · Mind and Body Solutions

What is stevia and is it healthy?

Stevia comes from the leaves of Stevia rebaudiana, a plant native to South America. Its leaves are packed with compounds called steviol glycosides — the most abundant being rebaudioside A and stevioside — which are about 200–300 times sweeter than table sugar.

The stevia you’ll find in foods and drinks today isn’t the same form as the crushed leaves people used for centuries to sweeten tea. The FDA only allows the use of high-purity stevia extracts containing 95% or more steviol glycosides, compounds that don’t raise blood sugar, provide calories, or have the same metabolic and hormonal impacts as sugar.

So why the scrutiny? For starters, when stevia hit the U.S. market in 2008, it followed decades of backlash against artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose and got inaccurately lumped into the same category.

How Is Stevia Metabolized in the Body?

Stevia moves through your body like a widget on a factory line:

Your small intestine passes it to your colon
In the colon, workers (your gut bacteria) break it down into parts.
Then it rolls down the conveyor belt to your liver, which repackages it into a harmless form — steviol glucuronide— and ships it off to your kidneys.
They prep it for delivery and send it out to be excreted in urine, no scraps left behind.

Here’s how that process works in a bit more detail.

1. Digestion and absorption

The chemical structure of steviol glycosides includes a steviol backbone with sugar molecules that your digestive enzymes can’t break apart.

So while stevia lights up the sweetness receptors in your taste buds, your small intestine doesn’t absorb it, and almost no calories or glucose enter your bloodstream. This is why stevia doesn’t raise blood sugar or insulin levels.

2. Metabolism in the colon

Your gut microbiota — especially the Bacteroidaceae species — does the work your small intestine can’t. Using enzymes like beta-glucosidase, they snip the bonds that hold sugar molecules onto the steviol backbone, releasing steviol, the non-sugar part of the molecule. This hydrolysis process unfolds slowly over 10 to 24 hours. In other words, your small intestine can't digest stevia, so it travels on to your colon, where gut bacteria slowly break it down.

Even though gut bacteria handle this step, studies show stevia has little to no effect on microbiome balance at normal consumption levels. This matters because it means stevia doesn't disrupt your gut health — even though bacteria do the digestive work, stevia passes through without throwing off the delicate balance of good bacteria in your colon.

This puts stevia in a different category from certain artificial sweeteners that can shift gut bacteria in ways that may influence glucose tolerance or inflammation. In other words, it’s a safer bet for folks who care about maintaining a healthy microbiome.

In fact, a 150-pound person would have to eat almost 40 packets of tabletop stevia sweetener in a day to exceed the FDA's daily limit. I’ll explain why and break it all down in a moment.

3. Liver processing

Once freed from the sugar molecules by your gut bacteria, steviol travels through the bloodstream to your liver. There it’s converted into steviol glucuronide, a harmless, water-soluble compound which is then filtered by your kidneys into the urine. This detox-like conversion packages stevia for elimination, ensuring no buildup in tissues or organs.

4. Excretion

You eliminate steviol glucuronide through urine within about 24 to 72 hours of ingestion. It doesn’t linger or accumulate, and your body doesn’t store it as energy like it does glucose. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Stevia improves metabolic health.

Unlike sugar, stevia doesn’t raise blood sugar or insulin. In fact, a recent meta-analysis of 26 studies suggests stevia modestly improves fasting glucose in people with obesity, type 2 diabetes, or high blood pressure. Stevia appears to enhance insulin signaling, helping cells take up more glucose from the bloodstream for energy.

Studies also suggest that stevioside and steviol nudge the pancreas to release a little more insulin when blood sugar is high — just enough to help bring it down, not enough to send you crashing.

You’ll sometimes see stevia labeled “anti-diabetic,” but that’s overselling it. Stevia isn’t medicine, but the research suggests it does make it easier to manage blood sugar and avoid the rollercoaster.

How Much Stevia Is Safe to Consume?

Global authorities, including the FDA and World Health Organization (WHO), have deemed purified stevia safe at levels up to 4 milligrams (mg) of steviol equivalents per kilogram of body weight per day.

That equals 12 mg of high-purity stevia extracts using a conversion factor that accounts for the metabolism of steviol glycosides to steviols. For a 150-pound (68 kg) person, this equates to 816 mg of stevia, or roughly 39 packets of a tabletop stevia sweetener containing 21 mg of steviol glycosides per packet.

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